The present invention relates generally to the field of rotating memory devices used for mass storage of data, more particularly to disk drives for use with interchangeable disk media, and especially to an autoloading disk drive capable of accepting an input stack of such interchangeable disk media and sequentially selecting each of the disks in the input stack for either reading the data therefrom or writing new data thereon. It will be understood that such interchangeable disk media comprise not only the familiar floppy diskettes using magnetic recording of data on a circular-disk media rotating within an outer envelope, but may also include any other form of removable, interchangeable planar storage media such as optically scanned media, media which are not rotated but rectilinearly scanned, or others as appropriate.
The use of such disk media in the form of floppy diskettes has become very widespread as a result of the growth of the small-computer industry in recent times. Diskettes are used for the storage of new data generated by the computer, as a convenient means for the distribution of computer software in commerce, and for backup of data present on other media such as fixed hard disks. Diskettes used for the distribution of software or for the backup of data are produced by simply copying data from a source onto one or more of the diskettes.
In order to avoid the tedious manual insertion and removal of each diskette which are required when using a conventional disk drive during such copying operations, an automatically loaded disk drive is desirable. Such a drive should ideally be able, under the control of a host computer, to accept input diskettes in the form of a stack, to sequentially select each one of the diskettes in the stack, to write to, and to read from the selected diskette, and to deposit the diskettes after such operations in one or more output stacks.
Such an autoloading disk drive should be inexpensive, compact, reliable and easy to maintain and repair. In particular, its handling of diskettes should result in rapid and reliable loading and unloading of the drive mechanism without jamming or damage to the diskettes. Ideally, the design of such a drive should permit as many as 250 or more input diskettes to be accommodated.